


Heredity

by JustAnotherGhostwriter



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: All I wanted for Christmas was the ability to write short things, Character Study, Ed's guilt complex is bigger than he is, Ed-centric, F/M, FMA Secret Santa 2020, Gen, Heavy-handed metaphors, No beta; we die like Roy's mustache
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:06:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28369593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustAnotherGhostwriter/pseuds/JustAnotherGhostwriter
Summary: noun:heredity1.	the passing on of physical or mental characteristics genetically from one generation to another.2.	the inheritance of a title, office, or right.A small study of the things Edward Elric inherited, the things he gained himself, and the things he intends to pass on.
Relationships: Alphonse Elric & Edward Elric, Edward Elric & Trisha Elric, Edward Elric & Van Hohenheim, Edward Elric/Winry Rockbell
Comments: 17
Kudos: 65
Collections: FMA Secret Santa 2020





	Heredity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [notsocoolio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notsocoolio/gifts).



> Happy holidays, Coolio! I swear I tried to make this a coherent fic with a plot and chronological narrative and everything, but it insisted on coming out as more like a character study. I hope it’s still okay, since you love our little angry gremlin boy a lot. Thanks for participating in this exchange, and may next year go well for you!

Ed remembered his mother being drawn into the room by the sound of the books crashing all around him. As he heard the footsteps, he’d tried, in vain, to tidy up the mess he’d accidentally made in the study. When the door had opened, he’d faced his mother with false defiance that hid the guilt and the fear of punishment.

“What are you doing?” his mom had asked, voice carefully neutral as she scanned the floor.

Sometimes, when he went over this faded memory, he was sure she was looking carefully for any signs he was injured. Other times he only remembered her making sure Hohenheim’s books weren’t damaged beyond repair.

He’d tried to sound confident as he told her he was looking for a book about a very specific kind of alchemy. He’d tried to remain vague so his mother would go away, but Mom had both wanted to help and had wanted to distract him from the dangerous books, many not even written in Amestrian, he would find out later in life, and she’d refused to stop pushing until he blurted out the truth.

“Change your hair?” She’d looked baffled, and then she’d tipped her head in askance. It was a move Al had subconsciously copied.

“And my eyes,” Ed corrected. He’d crossed his arms. “I want to look like you, not… _him_.”

He’d been far too young to see the irony in using the alchemy he inherited from his father in an attempt to distance himself from Hohenheim; at the time, his four-year-old heart had only known that he looked nothing like the parent who had stayed and loved him and everything like the parent who had left. Whom Al spent hours crying for, on some nights. Who wasn’t around to help Mom like the other dads were. He couldn’t understand, yet, all the nuances of _why,_ but he’d known with absolute clarity that he did not want to be associated with the person who had _chosen_ to leave them all behind.

“But I love that I can look at you and see your Daddy,” his mom had said, quietly. 

On some nights, Ed was still ashamed of what he’d answered: “Then make him come back so you can look at him.”

He thought he must have erased his mother’s full reaction from memory, because, in his mind’s eye, she barely twitched at his angry outburst. Instead, she’d just come to sit beside him while he kept his arms tightly folded and looked at the carpet and not her.

“You have bits of both of us in you, Ed,” his mom had said, gently and quietly, one hand in his spun-gold hair. “You may look like your dad a bit more, but in all the ways that count, you’re a lot more like me.” Ed had huffed and pouted, and his mother had laughed. “See? _That’s_ all me. It’s all here, inside you.”

She’d tried to tickle him after placing a hand on his heart to demonstrate her point, but Ed had been _mad_ and he’d squirmed away with a growl, still not wanting to look at her. Looking back, he could name the emotions as betrayal and hurt and feeling _othered_ by the person he just wanted to have a deeper connection with than whatever _inside stuff_ she was talking about. His mother had fallen silent for what had seemed, back then, like a very long time.

“What about Al?” she’d asked, eventually. “If you change your hair and eyes, then he’ll be left out. He won’t have anybody to look like, and he’ll be sad and lonely. Will you leave him behind?”

Ed had abandoned his attempts to become brunette and green-eyed after that, even if the intense dislike of being associated with his father had remained. It had taken many more years before he learned, for the first time if not the last, that there were lots of different kinds of abandonment. He’d thought, because his mom hadn’t _chosen_ to leave, like Hohenheim had, that it wasn’t her leaving them behind at all. For all the doubt he had in his father returning, Ed believed fully and firmly that his mom would come back, if only they called her.

Turned out that whatever bits of her were inside him – DNA and stubbornness and everything in-between – just weren’t _enough_.

Turned out that Al left him behind, instead of the other way around.

On days when the automail ached, Ed made himself remember those moments he’d been left alone, with a corpse in front of him and his brother’s empty clothes beside him. Nothing in the world could hurt as much as that. What came a close second, though, was looking at armour and forcing his brain to edit in how Al had once looked so he didn’t ever forget what his little brother _still_ looked like, wherever his body was out there. Often enough it could have been called a pattern, Ed found himself tying his hair back tightly before he looked in a slightly fogged-up bathroom mirror. He traced the general face shape and the eye and hair colour and he forced it to stay somewhere he _would not_ forget. It was a desperate, childish thing, but he’d already started losing the sharp clarity of his mother’s laugh and the way her hands felt on his shoulder and the exact cadence to her humming, and he would _not_ let Al slip further away than he’d already forced his little brother to go.

Fate twisted a knife in, cruel and deep, when Ed realised that the something despicably evil that lived underneath Amestris looked like Hohenheim. But Hohenheim still wasn’t there, and Al looked like armour, and it was Ed’s job, therefore, by his own sins – not good enough to make his father stay, not good enough to keep his little brother safe – to bear the mantle as the only person left with the same features: evil looked like Ed.

It shouldn’t have been a shock, after all he’d done since he was eleven years old, but Ed still spent too long in the shower afterwards trying to wash away dirt that existed inside, and not in the colour of his hair or eyes.

* * *

Ed could count on one – flesh – hand the number of times he’d gotten mad at Winry out loud because she’d referred to the automail as _hers_.

“It’s _attached to my nervous system;_ it’s _not yours_ ,” he’d roared at her, indignant and ashamed and guilty after her rage at him yet again wrecking his limbs in some (possibly avoidable) fight in some town somewhere on Mustang’s orders.

He couldn’t understand why she’d get so upset. Why even Granny would rag on him more than she would for other customers. Why Ed bought the leg and arm and paid for every repair and every replacement and the Rockbells, the younger in particular, still claimed it as _theirs_.

Luckily, Ed was a fast learner.

He learned that the right to those limbs were his, but that there was far less of a sever between the maker and the wearer than amputation implied. The limbs are his, but the limbs are theirs, too, and carry out their will and intentions and hopes and craftsmanship even as they carry out the will of Ed’s synapses. All is one.

He respected (and feared, and liked) Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye a great deal, but Ed refused to give in to her instances that he learn to use a gun. _Just in case_ , she cajoled, but Ed was all too familiar what having knowledge of something meant. He wanted his hands – especially the one inherited from Winry Rockbell – to never have the means to flawlessly, effortlessly extract clinical, emotionally detached death.

“Perhaps I was wrong to tell you about Ishval,” she murmured, once, and her lack of disappointment almost hurt as though she were furious at him.

“Better to know what you’re carrying with you,” Ed replied.

Riza looked at him, sharply, and he knew her enough to read the alarm and the pain and the stubborn refusal in her eyes. “Ishval is _not_ yours to carry,” she insisted, with a tone that sounded like she’d take on the world to make it true.

Ed almost wanted to lie to her, but lies didn’t stop the truth from being true. So he’d tried to smile at her, instead. “Maybe it’s because I joined the military,” he said, quietly. “Or maybe, even without this pocket watch it would have been mine to carry. No, listen, Lieutenant,” he said, when Hawkeye began to argue, and for once she fell silent under his order. “My best friend’s parents were killed in that war. We got to see her lonely and grieving day after day. We got to see Granny do the same but not really get the chance to. That same best friend and her Granny make most of their living off amputees from the Ishval war. The guy who killed the Rockbells is trying to kill me because a bunch of Amestrian alchemists killed his brother. And he almost – _almost_ – has just cause with me, because _my_ alchemy _did_ kill my own little brother.”

Riza was very, very still as she watched him. “All is one, and one is all,” Ed murmured, softly. “We don’t get to choose whether we carry this war with us, or not. We just… Have to choose what we do with what we’re handed. And I’m definitely not choosing murder. Not ever. No matter what.”

Fate – Truth, a god, something – tested him on that promise when he stood in front of the means to get Al back at the cost of souls. Evil souls, very possibly. But still… people. Brothers and mothers and lovers and everything in between. He had the burden of _knowing_ the key to immortality, and he held it in his hands – flesh given to him by Mom and Hohenheim, automail by Granny and Winry – and he’d chosen what to do with it.

“I’m sorry, Al,” didn’t even cover it.

But his brother’s soul was still inside that armour, and Alphonse Elric did the opposite of condemning him for his choice.

It was fitting, he thought, that he ended it all by punching the one called Father in the face with a flesh fist he had been gifted by his brother’s sacrifice.

* * *

He didn’t _mean_ to, but he ended up sort-of-kind-of-almost finding out about Hawkeye’s back – what had been there, what was there now, and who had been present for the change. He didn’t pry, and Mustang had seemed (relieved) surprised by it, but, to Ed, it made sense in the way that lived experiences did.

Granny and Winry had made scars all over his shoulder and leg. Their hands, while they’d carved in the permanent markers of all he’d done and failed to be, had been full of care and love, too.

He couldn’t begrudge them. Just like he could not really bring himself to regret the other scars he’d brought upon himself – the insignificant ones, the funny ones, and then Kimblee’s scar, which had been his own stupidity and one of the times he’d truly felt most like himself. The scar on his side spoke as much about who he was as the automail scars, and Ed thought he was learning not to hate what he found in the mirror. The abdominal mark told him that Edward Elric was a man who gave mercy instead of taking lives, and he would bear the consequences of that gladly.

Most days. Some days were harder than others to look at the memories that would be carried around with him like ghosts. But, really, the alternative was coming out of those experiences entirely unscathed, with only memories to show that he’d _been_ there and _done_ those things and _existed_ so much as himself and his own choices, for better or for worse. He’d seen Mustang idly trace one or two of his scars, on some days, and Ed had never mocked the bastard for that, ever, because he’d always understood even as he knew he could never fully get it.

* * *

“Sorry.” Havoc’s voice was sheepish. “You must be pretty sick of everybody telling you how much like the Chief you look, huh?”

Al’s thin hand stroked briefly through Ed’s hair to check if his brother was awake, and Ed feigned sleep so Al could have the freedom to say whatever he wanted without feeling bad.

“Honestly?” Al said, voice hesitant, leg shifting slightly under Ed’s cheek. He continued to pretend to be asleep across most of Al’s hospital bed. Fuery hummed in encouragement. “It’s… one of my favourite things to hear in the world,” Al admitted, shyly.

“You look like _you_ , Alphonse,” Teacher insisted, firmly.

“I know,” Al reassured her, and Ed was used to attaching the imagined smile to the words. “And who I am looks like Brother. It’s like… do you know that when he laughs – properly, out of actual joy – he laughs exactly like our Mom did? It’s Brother. But it’s…”

“Right,” Hawkeye said, after a brief pause, and there was too much weight in her words for it just to be a conversation filler.

“Does anybody have a pen or a marker? Brother’s fever is gone, and I need to get him back for something.”

It was harder to keep pretending he was asleep; Ed let himself ‘wake up’ when the marker first started touching his skin. And he put up a squawking fuss to make everybody else in the room – far more than the max two visitors that were _technically_ allowed – smile or smirk. Because they deserved whatever lightheartedness they could get, and he was willing, just this once – just for Al’s smile – to be the scapegoat. 

* * *

“He said to give it to somebody who needed it,” Ed said, incredulously staring at the new leg now that the nerve re-attachment had stopped hurting.

“ _You_ need it,” Winry said, firmly.

“I can pay for – ”

“Ed.” She looked at him with a grown-up seriousness he didn’t know, and his heart flipped at the sudden loss of familiarity. And then Winry was back, gentle and kind and a little awkward. “I… You need to remember. Not just the beginning, but how it ended. You told me, once, that I helped give you the leg to walk forward on.” She blushed, a little. “You need to walk forward on _this_ ; on the reminder of what you did _now_ instead of just what you did back _then_. The victory as well as the loss.”

Ed stared at her and then down at the leg that had been made of Al’s old armour body, and he nodded, something inexplicably tight in his throat.

“You okay?”

“Hmmm. Win?” He met her gaze, and wanted to tell her he needed her hands to teach him how to give hope to others, instead of just cynical facts. That was what had convinced him, really, underneath all the other millions of reasons: he wanted to pass on hands like hers. And eyes like hers. And the fruit of what she and he had worked for, without the necessity of the pain and the loss and the mistakes needed to gain it all.

“Thank you,” he settled on, because it wasn’t _yet_ the time to explain to her that he always wanted to end his endeavours and his research and his victories by coming back to her. 

* * *

Ed dumped the bundle – carefully – into Teacher’s arms, and the woman locked up as though she’d been paralysed. For a long moment, she just looked down and stared, and then Sig’s hand was gently on her shoulder and her posture softened, turning into a protective curl around the burden she carried.

“He looks like you, the poor kid,” she murmured, but her voice was too cracked to pass as gruff.

“Eh. It’s what’s inside that counts.”

Winry snaked her arms around Ed’s shoulders, smiling in blissful contentment, and watched her son grab at Teacher’s hands. Teacher let out a laugh-sob, and Sig started openly crying, and Ed found himself grinning at the picture. That kid would be inheriting him, yes, but he had Winry in him, too. Granny, Al, Teacher, Sig, Riza and even Roy, even though Ed would deny it to his last breath. He’d be brought up on gifts and stories and visits from Xing and by a young lady who insisted that Ed take a million pictures of ‘her new little brother’ so she could show them off to people as proudly as her own father had once shown her off.

He had Uncle Yuriy and Aunt Sarah. He had Mom and Hohenheim.

All four of them had loved their children and the world to the point of sacrifice, and Ed would not dishonour that. Instead, he’d give back eleven where ten had been taken; after all, he’d learned for many years that living was a sort of sacrifice, too. And one he’d choose, gladly, again and again, to give for those he loved.

**Author's Note:**

> You will pry the headcanon that Ed gets a leg made of Al's old armour from my dead hands. (And the second chapter of _Lessons_ , whenever on this green earth that decides to finally materialise.)


End file.
